Durban was great!… Except the horror movie I found myself in on Saturday night

It was my third-to-last night in Durban tonight, so two friends and I decided to go and see a movie (Madagascar 2 – a disappointment, considering the first Madagascar film was brilliant) and then off to Spiga D’oro (Shabir Shaik’s favourite hangout – an awesome place actually) for a bite to eat. The day was sunny, a first for the near two weeks I had spent in town already and the evening thunderstorm approaching from the horizon provided a great atmosphere for the perfect end to a hot and humid day. We sat at our table on the pavement outside the restaurant, watching the storm roll in.

Jennifer, Peter and I left town in very good spirits, just as the first of the rain began to appear. After a slow drive back to Westville in a torrential downpour, surrounded by a brilliant ligtning show, we sat in Jennifer’s flat and watched the film “Love Actually”. At about ten forty five, the storm had passed and Peter and I left, him giving me a lift back to Hillcrest where I was staying. But we didn’t even make it into the next road from Jennifer’s flat before the night got pretty creepy, and I lie in my bed writing this and feeling rather freaked out.

About a hundred meters after turning out of Jennifer’s road, we spotted a soggy, but well-fed-looking German Shepherd walking along the grass verge of the roadside. Peter slowed as we drove past and I could see the dog had a collar on. So we stopped and I hopped out and called the dog to me. The dog came straight away and I could see that this was no stray – it was well fed, obedient and collared, yet no tag was on the collar. After making calls to the people we knew in the area, we were left with no choice but to ring people’s doorbells, to see if they could give us any information as to whom this sweet but incredibly dirty dog belonged to. It stank and was drenched from the storm.

We considered taking it to the SPCA, but we would have had to put it in Peter’s mother’s car (he was also on holiday in Durban and had borrowed the car). Now I may have self esteem issues, but I value my life. Knowing Peter’s mother, we decided against putting the dog in the car.

It seems that the vibrant people living in Westville all go to bed before 11pm on a Saturday, so we were not having much luck with people answering their doorbells until one lady answered our frantic buzzing at her gate. We explained the situation and she said that the people living across the road owned a German Shepherd. We thanked her and made our way across the road. This was where we got a bit creeped out.

Across the road was the beginning of a driveway. Standing at the bottom of this driveway, all we could see was a thick overhang of bushes and nothing beyond that – it was pitch dark. And I mean PITCH black.

Peter had parked the car down the road where we had found the dog so we were on foot. He went to fetch the car so that we could shine the headlights up the driveway, seeing as most driveways in Durban suburbs are not enormously long. After he got the car, we shone the lights up the driveway, only to see more and more driveway. It was a long one. So Peter, the dog and I started walking up the sloping drive, slipping on the mossy, wet bricks paving the ground.

We made it to a pair of white gates that were open and from there could see that at the end of the driveway, swinging around to the left was a house. A dark house of which we could only make out the outline.

Again, Peter decided to go back to the car and drive it up the driveway so we could see what was there and if it looked inhabited. I stayed by the gates. But the immense panicked feeling, accompanied by the visions in my head of a pair of hand reaching out from the bushes to grab me and slit my throat made me whine like a little girl and plead “oh please don’t leave me here by myself!”

I walked half way back down with Peter and he got the car while the dog and I moved out of the way so he could pass. When he reached the top of the drive, we could see a house without any lights on, with a table outside the front door, a dingy caravan in front of the garage and a boat under a protective cover that looked as if it had been there since before we were born. A damn creepy sight. But everything was so dark.

“Great. This looks like something out of one of those horror movies with inbred Americans who kill tourists and eat them in casseroles” I thought, but chose to limit my scared appearance by saying “Dude, this looks fucking freaky. This is a seriously creepy house.” It was at this time that Peter realized if those white gates started closing, we were in a lot of trouble. Luckily he kept that to himself or I would have probably started hyperventilating.

We went up to the front of the house where there were two doors, one of which was open with a security gate in front of it, a board at the bottom and a CEILING FAN resting against it?! The table was covered in junk like another fan and pots and pans. The windows were open too. I was expecting someone to come out of the house and blow our brains into vapour for trespassing. It looked like we had stumbled upon an inbred colony. The house was dark with no sign of life, except two small dogs barking inside the open door, which we couldn’t see because of the board across the bottom.

We knocked on the door and called (yelled actually) out “hello” countless times with no answer. Eventually, the German Shepherd began to bark at the neighbour’s dogs on the adjacent property that were going ballistic from all the shouting. By this time we were so creeped out by this house that was a mixture of something out of the film “Psycho” and the teen horror flick “Wrong Turn”, that we decided to eave. The dog seemed to be walking around a lot, more than it had when we were out on the road which we took as a sign that it was familiar with this place. We got back in the car quickly and checked to see if the dog followed us. It didn’t.

Peter reversed as quickly as he could down the driveway to get the hell out of there but when we reached the bottom, we decided to check with the neighbours about the dog, thinking that maybe we had the wrong house. As I got out of the car I could hear a man yelling: “Sid! Come here! Come inside!”

There were lights on the top of the hill that were not there before, presumably from the creepy house. We began calling “Hello!?” up the hill as there was no way we were going up there again and we hoped the man calling the dog to come inside would come down and confirm that the dog was his. The man called the dog again, and we heard a door close. And that was that.

The bastard ignored us, even thought it was now twenty five past eleven and we had been running around with this poor dog for well over half an hour. I told peter to put his headlights on full to shine up the driveway, and when he did, we could see the dog was gone. Relieved but pissed off, and pitying the poor dog that has such an asshole of an owner, we set off on our way. WHo the hell leaves their dog outside in a storm, with their gates open? And when people bring him back you ignore them? What a freak.

Both utterly freaked out, I kept checking the back of the car to make sure no axe murderer had gotten inside the car while we were at the front door and Peter asked if we were being followed. I said I was just checking for a psycho in the back and he thought I was joking – I wasn’t.

I got home so late, and my parents were a bit worried as my phone had died. I was so glad to be home, but even our house looked a little creepy at this stage After telling my mum the story and giving my hands a really good scrubbing, my mum explained why our house was so dark – lighting had blown half the lights’ fuses in the house during the storm. Meaning my room would be pitch-black when I went to sleep. “Greaaaaat” I thought, especially as my cat used to sleep under my balcony. My dead cat now. And the day we had her put down last week, I heard a few “mews” coming from outside…

Durban has some creepy shit going on. Fun in the sun – creepy shit at night.

OMG!!! It's a bloke who doesn't give a crap about his pet dog! But wait... the inbreds are eating the bloke! Good inbreds... Gooood inbreds...